In Chris F. Holm’s second installment in his Collector series, THE WRONG GOODBYE, things start getting pretty rotten, pretty quickly. Hot on the heels of Holm’s debut novel DEAD HARVEST, our man Sam Thornton is trying his hardest to keep a low profile. He’s doing his best to keep his nose clean, get the job done, and move on. But when “getting the job done” entails collecting the souls of the dead and damned for his handler, the mythical Lilith, things never seem to go smoothly.

You see, when Lilith assigns Sam to collect a soul, Sam had damn well better collect a soul. So when we meet up with the Collector in South America, on his way to collect a dirty-as-hell, damned-for-eternity drug lord, Sam’s world is turned upside down when he finds another Collector has gotten there first. If Sam can’t track down the purloined soul, all Hell will turn up looking for it, and all us mortals may be washed away in the chaos.

In DEAD HARVEST, Holm succeeded is setting up the template for a world that was crying out for further exploration and now we get it. Sam has been a Collector for decades, and being able to see how and with whom he’s spent all this time opens up the character for the reader to relate to. We all love a solitary agent of Hell, but with the WRONG GOODBYE, we are able to see beyond Sam’s crusty shell in a way that makes him incredibly relatable for the reader.

An undead agent of Hell? Relatable to the reader? As written by Chris F. Holm? You bet.

Even though he works as a solitary agent of the underworld, this adventure requires a little backup. Say “hello” to Gio, a recently collected Vegas underworld type transplanted into a size XX body. Maybe not the “underworld” help Sam had in mind, but useful nonetheless. Two undead dudes, not quite on a mission from God. The only thing this road trip requires is a hot car. (Spoiler: they have one of those, too.)

With an ever-widening path of chaos and mayhem growing behind them, Sam and Gio are desperate to locate the missing soul. With the tensions growing more and more uncomfortable between Heaven and Hell, and a new, diabolical third party showing up in-between, and massive swarms of bugs and creepy crawlers following Sam from place to place, things don’t look to be getting better any time soon.